Modern Warfare 3 Makes a Billion Dollars Faster than Avatar

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Sixteen days. That's how long it took Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 to rack up sales of a billion dollars for Activision. For comparison's sake, the highest grossing movie ever made, Avatar, took 17 days to reach that mark.

While I may have a personal distaste for the title at hand (it goes beyond rehash to often times a straight up clone with far worse maps), I can't help but be proud of the video game industry for reaching a point like this. People often ask me why I write about video games at Forbes, as the two seem rather disparate. This, this is why.

Traditional media like TV and movies are holding steady or even struggling, as they try to figure out the best way to move forward in the digital age. But the video game industry is booming, with new markets opening up across all ages and both genders, and what was traditionally a young, male activity is now for everyone (though I have to admit young males are what drove MW3 to a billion this quickly).

Still though, these sorts of accomplishments are not being reported with the same sort of enthusiasm at it would if say, another film had broken Avatar's record. We'll get there, but video games are still somewhat of a pariah outside of the gaming press itself, but with news like this, it's slowly creeping into the mainstream. It has to. With numbers like these, resistance is futile.

And speaking of numbers, Modern Warfare 3 has a few more that are worth sharing along with this news. The game made $775M in just five days, and since launch has logged 7 million hours from players online. It also broke a new record for concurrent Xbox Live players at 3.3 million, and the servers didn't even go down.

I may not like the game, and have myself been wandering around adventuring in Skyrim rather than owning noobs with my SCAR-H, but fundamentally, it's good for the industry as a whole to see ANY game achieve this level of success, and I expect records like this to keep being broken.